Here is a breaking news from Amazon. Amazon Web Services is releasing Relational Database as a Service (RDS). The press release is yet to go out but the website is active. They will be announcing the news at 1:00 AM PST tomorrow. Even though AWS has a storage cloud (S3), Compute Cloud (EC2) and a non relational Database Cloud (SimpleDB), they never offered Relational Databases as a service. In fact, this was one of the biggest demands by the AWS users and now they have listened (or forced by Microsoft?).

Amazon RDS is nothing but a MySQL 5.1 database instance that is exclusively for a particular user and can be accessed via a single API call. The user gets all the capabilities of MySQL database with an additional ability to scale up based on the needs. It rids the customers of any need for time consuming database administration tasks. The patches are applied automatically with the database backed up automatically with a possibility for the user to set the retention period.

Amazon RDS is priced similar to Amazon EC2. There are costs involved with usage of database instances, persistent storage up to 1 TB, costs for I/O requests, costs for backup storage and data transfer costs. The smallest instance costs 11 cents per hour and one can scale up to quadruple extra large instance of 68 GB of memory, 26 ECUs (8 virtual cores with 3.25 ECUs each), 64-bit platform.

After resisting the demands for a relational database for a long time, Amazon has suddenly jumped into the game. I am suspecting that this is an attempt to preempt Microsoft’s announcement about the public release of Azure SQL relational database cloud later this month at PDC ’09. I see a pattern here. For a long time, Amazon was not keen on releasing Windows based instances as a part of their EC2 offering. Last year, at about the same time, when it became clear that Microsoft will announce a Windows cloud at PDC ’08, Amazon preempted the announcement with their own Windows based EC2 instances. I like this competition as I strongly believe that such a competition is good for the Cloud marketplace.

This announcement will also crush the Y-Combinator startup FathomDB that offers database as a service that is run on top of Amazon EC2. It will be interesting to see how they respond to this announcement. Probably, this announcement should also serve as a warning bell for the companies that build their entire business on Amazon ecosystem. They are just one announcement away from complete destruction. It is not unique to Amazon ecosystem alone. It can happen to any company whose business relies entirely on one vendor’s ecosystem.

Editor’s update: Congrat’s to Krish for being fast and conclusive. And here’s a rare screenhsot from TechMeme:

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Director, OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat. Founder of Rishidot Research, a research community focused on services world. His focus is on Platform Services, Infrastructure and the role of Open Source in the services era. Krish has been writing @ CloudAve from its inception and had also been part of GigaOm Pro Analyst Group. The opinions expressed here are his own and are neither representative of his employer, Red Hat, nor CloudAve, nor its sponsors.

Seems like Amazon is going after the developers to offer end-to-end stack. My bet is that the next one to fall will be middleware. While Sun, VMware paid big $$$ to acquire MySQL, SpringSource, Amazon can simply package it with API, offer it as *aaS and make it palatable for developers who are under constant pressure to deliver on new projects.. Ahh.. got to love the GPL license where *aaS gets a free ride 😉 Hope to see Amazon contribute back to the OSS community in some ways!

Not sure why anybody is surprised by this – even before the announcement, you could set up a nearly identical system using EC2, S3 and EBS. The pricing would even be similar; all that would have been missing was some of the UI bits.

The lesson cloud vendors should take from this is that if you’re not running your own cloud and you’re doing something fairly standard systems-wise, you’re likely to lose. A startup like FathomDB can still work, but it’s going to be competing on the “frilly” features like performance monitoring.

Similarly, I doubt that Amazon will offer much competition to Heroku, as the major win with Heroku is more in API and user interface. It’s also targeted at a much smaller scale.

Anyone building their business model on top of an online book store that got confused and became the Swiss army knife of retail companies, then got lost again and is trying to become a cloud service provider outta loose their shirt.